With WWDC 2024 less than a month away, we’re starting to get a good idea of what Apple has in mind as its big software announcements, namely iOS 18. We already knew that AI was likely to be a major theme of the event, but a new report offers specifics of what that will involve.
According to the generally well-informed leaker Mark Gurman (citing “people familiar with the matter”), Apple “has closed in on an agreement” with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT features to the iPhone as of the launch of iOS 18 this year. Crucially, that would mean the technology being integrated into the phone’s own software, presumably powering searches and Siri queries among numerous other applications; ChatGPT is already available on the App Store as a third-party app.
The ambiguous tense of that sentence quoted above is worth clearing up. The deal has not been finalized, but it appears to be very close; Gurman contrasts the OpenAI situation with separate discussions concerning Google’s Gemini chatbot which “haven’t led to an agreement, but are ongoing.” He also notes that Apple and OpenAI have been in discussions for several months, that negotiations intensified in April, and that the two companies have recently been “finalizing terms.”
A separate report in the New York Times claims that Apple is working to revamp Siri in iOS 18 with an updated version that is “more conversational and versatile.”
Many pundits feel that Apple is late to the party in terms of AI, a hot buzzword in the tech community. But the AI hype has been balanced by a similar quantity of criticism when companies get it wrong, such as Gemini’s racially diverse Nazis. It always seemed likely that the naturally cautious Apple would license AI tech from someone else with a proven track record, and it seems we now know who that someone will be.
For all the latest news and rumors concerning Apple’s imminent software update, which will be announced in June and launched to the public in the fall, check out our regularly updated iOS 18 superguide.
Author: David Price, Editor, Macworld
David has been writing about technology for well over two decades, and got on board the Apple hype train when covering the original iPhone launch in 2007. He is an enthusiastic Apple Watch evangelist and feels that the HomePod is misunderstood.